Friday, April 21, 2017

We like to enjoy our time with family when travelling so I only review
our odd hotel stay or even less frequently review a flight. One such
flight where I did take just a couple of pics and felt was worth
reviewing was from our Family Day vacation trip to Maui. I think a
review is worthy since it is the only flight between Canada and Hawaii
that has a true international business class. Air Canada's other flights
from Vancouver and Toronto are on Rouge aircraft and WestJet's are
737's out of Vancouver with their regular Plus seats while some of their
Alberta-Hawaii flights are 767's which have the larger Plus seats but
aren't considered a true business class. The reason why Air Canada's
Maui flights are utilizing an internationally configured Air Canada 767
is that it is the same plane being used for the Calgary-Tokyo flights,
which of course would not be utilizing a Rouge aircraft. So as we
mentioned in our podcast a few weeks ago, if you are flying to Maui and
want to travel in style without connecting via the U.S. you'll want to
connect via Calgary.

The flight was schedule to depart at 5:30pm but ended up being delayed
by a mechanical issue. Just as most people had boarded the plane the
power went out from the APU. Within a minute or so power came back on
but of course they wanted and needed to check it out. You don't want to
be stuck in Kahului with a malfunctioning APU but rather make sure
whatever the issue was that it was corrected in Calgary. The resulting
delay was about an hour as we waited for AC maintenance to diagnose and
fix the issue. The flight ended up departing around 6:40pm and thanks to
a bit of shorter flight time then scheduled we arrived about 45 minutes
late into OGG.

We did a one way Aeroplan mile redemption for our entire family for the
business class flights to Maui. On the way back availability was scarce
for the number of seats we needed as it was during the Alberta Family
Day break so the return flight was in Economy. Still I'll take Air
Canada International Economy over Rouge. Not to mention the flight back
is overnight and typically under six hours so you don't get to enjoy the
business class as much except (and this is a big exception) the lie
flat seat for sleeping.

For the flight to Kahului I had seat 6F which is in the middle on the right hand side of the aircraft:

The menu for this flight:

I went for the BBQ Chicken with Grits and it was pretty good.... good enough that I also got it on my LAX-YYC flight a week ago!

and finally Rewards Canada being featured in the American Express ad on Air Canada's in flight entertainment

That's it in a nutshell! We can rarely say there is an advantage of flying out of Calgary but this is definitely one of them!